Determined by increased globalization and economic development, China’s ESL market is booming. The internet is abundant in ads calling for foreign native English teachers while some recruiters openly state their preference for white... more
Determined by increased globalization and economic development, China’s ESL market is booming. The internet is abundant in ads calling for foreign native English teachers while some recruiters openly state their preference for white teachers. Using a Western theoretical framework on ‘race’, my research seeks to analyze the racialization of ‘whiteness’ and ‘blackness’ inside China’s ESL market, taking into account contextual specificities. Drawing on eight in-depth, semi-structured interviews with foreign teachers in China, I begin my study by showing how the general climate of recruitment agencies and other intermediary agents in China is defined by exploitation, control and manipulation, which all teachers, regardless of their ‘race’ or nationality, fall victim to. I then continue by showing how the social construction of ‘whiteness’ and ‘blackness’ is shaped by deeply ingrained stereotypes of various groups of foreigners in China. These stereotypes find their roots in China’s historical encounter with the powerful West, which allowed Darwinist ideas on ‘race’ and global racial hierarchies to penetrate the Chinese society, as well as in contemporary westernizing projects in China and the influence of Western social media. Finally, I show how ‘nationality’ and ‘nativeness’ complicate the white-black binary of ‘race’ in the ESL industry and how Chinese stakeholders use ‘whiteness’ and ‘blackness’ and the meanings these categories encompass as benchmarks in the production of the ‘Self’.
